Experience Inquiry: 5 Powerful Strategies, 50 Practical Experiences

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and my guest today is Kimberly Mitchell. Kimberly is founder and CEO of Inquiry Partners based in Seattle. A former classroom teacher and school administrator who's worked in East LA, Ecuador, Greece, Argentina, and Seattle, Kimberly offers professional development on inquiry-based instruction to districts, schools, and classrooms. More information on her work in helping schools engage students and help them develop critical thinking, communication, and problem solving skills is available at inquirypartners.com.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:51] SPEAKER_01:

Kimberly, thank you so much for joining us for Principal Center Radio.

[00:54] SPEAKER_02:

Thanks for having me.

[00:55] SPEAKER_01:

So Kimberly, there's a lot of talk about inquiry these days, and we know that inquiry is supposedly a good thing, but I think there are probably a lot of misconceptions and a lack of clarity out there about inquiry. Tell us a little bit about what inquiry is and the kind of work that you do to help schools in their inquiry work.

[01:16] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I'll just start with describing how I got into this work with inquiry. I was a principal at a school in Athens, Greece. And the board asked me to start something called the International Baccalaureate Program. And the pedagogy that they emphasized was something called inquiry-based instruction. And I had to do a lot of learning about what this meant. And I started digging into the topic.

[01:43]

I will say that initially I thought that inquiry was something you did in science classes. And it involved lots of lab materials or a lot of problem-based or project-based learning. And what I've come to discover is that inquiry is not necessarily something that you do that's intricate it's more of an attitude than an action and so what I started to do is observe teachers who did inquiry really really well whether they were teaching kindergarten or high school math class and over the years I've been observing great inquiry teachers for about 15 years now as a school authorizer for international baccalaureate and as someone who travels to a lot of schools and gets to open the classroom doors and watch what happens

[02:35]

What I started to observe was that there were five things that were happening in really good inquiry-based classrooms. And they had nothing to do necessarily with the equipment or the lab. And they did have some connection obviously with the curriculum and the thought that went into the planning. But it was more of the attitude of the teacher. And so those five things I've seen done differently in classrooms, but they're the same theme. And so what I try and do is share those five key strategies for getting more student engagement.

[03:09]

And when we see great inquiry happening in classrooms, we see students regularly practicing critical thinking skills. communication, and creative problem solving. And so that's what I want to lift up and share with more people around the world.

[03:24] SPEAKER_01:

Fabulous. So Kimberly, as you help schools help students develop those three types of skills, critical thinking, communication, and creative problem solving, you've come up with five inquiry strategies that are kind of at the core of your work. Could you take us through those?

[03:40] SPEAKER_02:

Sure. Well, the first one is... called Get Personal. And basically this is making a personal connection and establishing the relevance around what the students are engaged with.

[03:55]

So there are several great ways of doing this. Some teachers are masters at storytelling and bringing their own stories to life or uncovering stories that help students make the connection between what they're engaged with in the classroom and what's happening in the world. There's also encouraging students to share their own experiences. So getting them to reflect on what they've experienced or their own theories about the topic before they dive in and start discussing it or learning more about it. The second strategy is talking less, listening more. And to do that well, it requires teachers to ask great questions.

[04:34]

So that means really understanding and planning in advance what are the higher level, if you think about Bloom's taxonomy or Webb's depth of knowledge or whatever construct you use, asking great questions helps students learn. think more deeply about what they're learning and that you know that involves strategies like turn and talk or when a student answers a question just simply saying tell me more instead of judging the response and that leads me to the third strategy which is holding back on judgment um and remaining more neutral. So when students are theorizing, instead of judging their response by good, excellent, or saying something like, I'm not sure about that, or that's wrong, or no, those responses tend to shut down the conversation rather than

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encourage more conversation and more thinking from students. So when we remain neutral and instead of responding with a judgment to a theory or an idea from a student, asking more gets them and everyone else around them to think more deeply. The third strategy is citing sources and providing evidence. And that means not just for asking students to do that, but also we as teachers standing before students and letting them know how we come to understand the world around us. And by sharing the sources of information, whether they be experiences or things that we've read or heard, And then really digging into the potential bias of sources and understanding when things are written or explained and how they're explained.

[06:20]

So that's the third strategy. The fourth is simply slowing down. There is such a frenetic pace in schools and there's a lot of perceived urgency around covering concepts and that's not always how we learn best. We learn best when we have time to think, when we have time to read and absorb information. So what we see great inquiry teachers doing is increasing wait time to a point where it's almost uncomfortable. And what we notice is that when you wait, you get more students to participate.

[07:03]

And so that's what we're about is the reticent students who often hold back and wait for others to answer for them. We want to see how we can get all students engaged at a deeper level. And wait time is a great way to do that.

[07:18] SPEAKER_01:

Fantastic. Now, as you were talking about encouraging students to cite sources or share evidence, I was thinking about good college instruction and how in a college course, when students are participating in a discussion, it's almost never okay just to share an opinion. You have to link your argument to the, you know, maybe the assigned readings for that day or the text that you're basing your discussion on. And would you say that that strategy is partially a reflection of your international baccalaureate background? Is that an emphasis in IB?

[07:54] SPEAKER_02:

It could be. I think a lot of it is reflecting on when I was teaching, I would make a lot of statements that I, as a teacher, didn't back up my own statements. And I really reflected on that. I think it actually came up when I was part of a critical friends group and we started talking about what we bring to the classroom and how...

[08:18]

our judgments, we need to cite sources, we need to model the things that we want our students doing. And so once I started to regularly or habitually cite my own sources, I noticed that my students started to naturally do the same. And I found that they found it intriguing to talk about things like if it comes from a .org, .com, or a .gov source, for example.

[08:43]

or a copyright date. And I also found over the years that students like to ask me to cite my sources and see if I could really back up what I was saying with evidence. So I think that is a core belief in IB. That's one of the principles of being an international thinker is that you're able to back up

[09:06] SPEAKER_01:

your theories and your ideas with some evidence or you're able to say you know what I don't have a lot of evidence to back this up it's my experience so let's discuss this further right well it's interesting because it it almost sounds like the the emphasis on specific references to the text in Common Core and I think you know a lot of these same points we could we could draw from the work that people are doing to prepare their students to meet the Common Core State Standards. But it's very interesting to me that this is coming from, you know, really a completely different angle. You know, so much of what we talk about these days is Common Core. And when you were talking about asking better questions under your second inquiry strategy about asking better questions and listening more and as the teacher talking less, you said something that

[09:59]

Brian Harris, one of our other guests on Principal Center Radio, also said, which I think is absolutely critical, that if we're going to ask better questions, if we're going to push students to deeper levels of thinking, we have to prepare those questions in advance. We have to have a sense of what we're going to ask, or else if we try to come up with all these questions on the fly, they're going to be lower level questions.

[10:23] SPEAKER_02:

I think that's absolutely true. I want to go back to what you said about Common Core and next gen science standards. I think they've finally caught up with what a lot of school systems around the world have already done and that I put international baccalaureate into that, into a system. This is something they've been doing for years. And so I'm really, I'm glad that Common Core asks us to do things like pay attention to text and and ask deeper questions and the fewer, clearer, higher standards I'm all for. As far as the planning for deeper questions, I absolutely agree with that.

[11:03]

I think some teachers, after a few years of doing this, are pretty good at knowing how to ask a question that's analytical or ask for student evaluation or synthesis. But I do think you need to write them down and really think about them in advance. And one thing that I have noticed great inquiry teachers doing is before a unit or a lesson, they actually meet with experts in the field and they ask them about the questions they have to ask themselves in their research work. And doing that really deep research before teaching a topic and understanding what the people in this field. Most of us live close to a university or community college, and I would say just getting in touch with the people who are in that field and getting a sense of what questions they're trying to answer is a great way to start to develop your own questions for the classroom.

[12:01] SPEAKER_01:

Fantastic. Now you've also taken some steps to help people get a really good sense of what these practices look like in the classroom. And I understand you have produced a video series walking people through each of those five strategies. Could you tell us a little bit about what you learned from that process of producing that video series on the five inquiry strategies?

[12:25] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I'll just say we didn't start with a video series. We started with something that I think worked really well, though it's very hard to scale and it's very expensive. And that is simply simulating what an inquiry classroom feels like with adults. So staff or parents, we would actually...

[12:46]

have them be the students and we would simulate an inquiry-based instructional lesson. And then we would discuss what strategies they noticed being practiced and how it was different from what they experienced when they were students in classrooms. So that was one thing we started doing in mostly international schools around the world. We would also do that with school staffs, and then the next day we would go into their classrooms and model inquiry-based instructional lessons using their lesson plans. And that was really important. They needed to see how this would look in the context of what they were teaching and what they were using planning-wise.

[13:28]

then we would debrief that experience with them and then the following day or however we scheduled it with the school we would then observe them trying out some of the strategies on their own and coaching them in real time now that is a really powerful sequence of events that you can see big changes especially if it's supported and nurtured over time with the principal But it is very hard to scale that work and to spread these practices. So we've developed a video series that helps teachers understand how these can look in classrooms using videos, but also using powerful question prompts so that they can talk about and reflect upon these strategies in their own context. They can use them in critical friends groups or PLCs or whatever

[14:19]

configuration at their school department level teams and so what we hope to do is motivate and inspire people to do more of these things in their classrooms and to then join a community of people around the world who want to see more engagement happening in classrooms We often say that schools are places where kids go to watch adults work really hard. Inquiry Partners wants to flip that. Schools should be places where students are working really hard and thinking critically and doing so joyfully. And so that is the ultimate goal.

[14:59] SPEAKER_01:

I like that as kind of a different perspective on the flipped classroom that, you know, it's not necessarily about getting students to watch videos and then do assignments rather than hear from the teacher and then do assignments, but really of placing that inquiry process at the heart of what students are doing every day. And I appreciate what you said about having adults, having teachers and principals and even parents go through that inquiry process the same way students will. And I will tell you, as a science teacher, I had the opportunity to participate in, I believe it was through the Institute for Systems Biology, a terrific series on inquiry-based instruction. And you really feel what it's like to be a learner in that environment when you have you know, have had that opportunity much differently from just kind of reading about inquiry or hearing about inquiry.

[15:52]

So I think that's a very powerful experience and I think those videos are going to be a great service to the profession in helping more people kind of immerse themselves in that experience and maybe try it for themselves.

[16:06] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I mean, the reason I started doing simulations and demonstrations is that I was working with International Baccalaureate, authorizing schools and delivering workshops. And I went to a school once and there was a teacher in the... meeting in the workshop who said you know you keep talking about inquiry and you share with us some research and even dialogues on what an inquiry classroom could sound like but we want you to show us and we want you to show us with our own students and that was um a frightening challenge to me at the time and I actually came back home and I thought you know there's I don't know if this would ever work and I I remember making a list of all the reasons why it could go sideways and the principal of that school called me the next week and said you know Kimberly I think that challenge was a real one and we'd like you to come back down here and model this and it was terrifying but I think what I learned is that you know the

[17:07]

Whether I need to be vulnerable if we want teachers to be vulnerable. And that's where you get real change is when people are willing to be vulnerable again and to not know it all. And so I did go fly back down there and I modeled inquiry in five classrooms. And the teachers at the end said that was the best professional development we've ever experienced. And so that is how I started developing. the work with inquiry partners, that was over 10 years ago now.

[17:37]

For the next few years after that experience, that's what I would do. I would go around the world to mostly IB schools and simply simulate and model inquiry. And so what I'm doing now with inquiry partners is a return to that work and an acknowledgement that we do need some virtual supports and videos to help complement that work.

[18:02] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I applaud those efforts to bring this to more people because I think we probably share the belief that inquiry is not just something for the students of, you know, for the children of diplomats in international schools or the smaller percentage of students in our public schools in the United States who have access to international baccalaureate programs. This is something that's for everyone. Can you talk about that a little bit?

[18:29] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. I mean, most of my career has been in public low-income schools, and I've had the advantage of learning a lot and and honing my skills with students um who are very low income from a developed country the united states and very high income from developing countries and you know this these strategies they're human strategies they work for absolutely everyone and i i've also noticed they work with my own children they work with adults it's it's a human thing we learn better when the cognitive demand is put on us. And we are not being told something, but we are left to grapple with them. We become meaning makers. That's when things really stick. And so that's what we need to bring back to a lot of schools.

[19:21]

We've lost sight of that, I think. I think right now, especially in the United States, we are spending a lot of energy on standards, curriculum, and assessment. And these are really important things, I agree. But we're not putting the same amount of effort and energy into great instruction, where I think the rubber meets the road. That is where learning takes place. That is where it's emotional and it's fraught and it's personal, but we need to go there.

[19:53]

We need to look at the relationship between the teacher, the student, and the work they're doing together in the classroom with more intention. And that's what I hope to do with inquiry partners.

[20:04] SPEAKER_01:

Fantastic. Well, Kimberly, thank you so much for sharing your work through Inquiry Partners with us on Principal Center Radio. If people want to learn more about that work, if people want to get in touch with you and Inquiry Partners, where can they find you online?

[20:16] SPEAKER_02:

Inquirypartners.com, and you will be able to get in touch with us for in-person consultations and to download our videos.

[20:28] SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic.

[20:29] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin.

[20:31] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[20:36] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, inquiry is a powerful process. And as a teaching practice, it's pretty ambitious. So one of my takeaways from my interview with Kimberly today is that whenever we're asking teachers to learn and engage with inquiry, and use a practice that is different from what they've always done and is as complex as inquiry-based instruction, there's nothing more powerful than seeing a working model. And one of the principals that Kimberly worked with, as you heard, realized that that was so important that he actually flew her back to his country to speak again in the school and not just give a presentation, but actually demonstrate the instructional practices that she had previously advocated. And I think that is so powerful with any type of professional development. Whenever people can actually see a working model, that answers so many of the objections and the questions that people naturally have when they just hear about something.

[21:34]

So whenever possible, if people can go and see the practice that they're learning about in action, if they can visit a classroom, if they can visit a school, if they can talk with people who've already been successful with that practice, a picture is really worth a thousand words. And seeing a practice in action is worth hundreds of hours of just hearing about it. So if you have some professional development coming up, make sure that you're building in time for modeling and ideally modeling in a real situation. So if you can set up some site visits or some visits into a classroom within your school where that practice is already being carried out successfully, go for it.

[22:12] Announcer:

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